United States | News & Politics

This is wrong on almost every level. It wasn't a genocide (some people call it that, but the mainstream liberal historical consensus is that it was collectivization being botched along with some bad crop conditions), it has very little to do with anything happening in the war, and the Russian Federation was brought into existence in order to overthrow the communists. The logical end point of Putin's weird revanchist rhetoric is closer to wanting to undo the separation of nations in the former Russian Empire that began under Lenin and bring things back to the Tsarist model that preceded it. That's what he means when he says that he wants to show Ukraine what "decommunization" entails, since the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, while it was still under a central authority, had greater autonomy than the region had under the Tsar and he is making the threat that he will take that away.

God, I hate how bad education is that this even needs to be explained. Imperial Russia had been suffering from famines on a cyclical basis for centuries and, contrary to what some people say, neither Lenin nor Stalin were magicians who could just bend reality in the USSR, though many -- including some "Stalinist" Marxists -- argue that Stalin basically tried to for left-deviationist reasons when material conditions didn't actually support collectivising the way he wanted the state to, and that (along with drought and blight) caused the famine. Important to understanding this, however, is that the only time there would ever be a famine in the USSR after that was in the aftermath of the Nazi invasion as a direct result thereof. The next "famine" in Russia would be around 50 years later with the establishment of the Russian Federation, where the gutting of just about every public program and industry caused a huge excess death event over a period of a couple years.

The idea of it being a genocide -- aside from being a lie popularized by Goebbels that has no support in the Soviet archives -- is even more ridiculous for the fact that the famine ended and nothing ever happened to the Ukrainians on fractionally that scale except for the Nazis! But of course the Ukrainian Nazis love saying the Russians wanted all Ukrainians dead, because it gave them cover for perpetrating the Holocaust (see "double genocide theory").

To add one last point on "this doesn't work as a genocide," a plurality of the victims were Ukrainian nationals, but it was spread out over multiple nations and the part of Ukraine the famine impacted was overwhelmingly in the east. You know, the part that's Russian in huge disproportion. Of course, one of the other countries impacted, with I think 1.5 million dead or something like that, was Russia! It would be like trying to wipe out a population by detonating an atom bomb where a quarter of the blast is on your side of the border, then just not doing anything when most of the population you targeted survived! It only makes sense if you're assuming the Russians were such miserable morons that the dumbest Banderite bandit is incomparably more refined.